Riging For A Rubik's Cube

[jbal]

Hey,

I recently got assigned a project that involves animating a 15x15x15 rubik's cube. The rigging needs to allow the layers to be rotated as in a rubik's cube. Unfortunately maya does not allow objects to belong to more than one group so I am stuck animating the visibility for many different versions of the cube that contain groups to be rotated. This is a very tedious process that takes up allot of geometry. I was wondering if anybody has an idea for a better set up?

[gmask]

I dunno the first thing that comes to mind is using a parent constraint instead of groups

[joojaa]

Horror, youd end up keying rotation, rotation offset and so on.... (now thsi si hard besue the way you ritated affects the end result)

[jbal]

I tried parenting but the same problem arises that with that a child can't have two parents. Maybe is their a way to bake the rotation information of the group in to it's children?

[gmask]

I was talking about a parent constraint.. to which an object can belong to as many as you need

[joojaa]

NO im afraid this is much easier simulated, theres really no way you can collapse this into a simple keying experience. Unless you make a huge working structure that just allows you to key a specified sequence.

mainly because each turn is depedent on each previous one, well itr can be keyed allright but its a bit over the top and for each rotation youd have to key the offsets. NAd the animator would have to be really in charge on how maya works to pull it off, or youd need to rig mel helper structures.

Iyts one of those things that depends on how datas prefeered to be stored in a animation application versus how a game or a program would handle it, (but they dont need random lookup)

PS look into how to key a rotating cube it has the solution for you.

[joojaa]

Ok i recant my words it much easier than i tought But its still a bit tedious on the end. (but do use quats and COPY keys for all boxes, place the pivot in middle)

out.Mov (~250kb qt)

[jbal]

Centering all the pivot works very well until about the third move.Ex 1 horizontal spin then a vertical but then when the next horizontal spin takes place the objects that have already rotated more than twice take a different spin because of their orientation.

[joojaa]

Yes, true if you use local eulers rotations BUT NOT if you use global quarteronion rotations (its very important that you use synchornized quarenionions interpretation on the curves, otherwise it will NOT WORK).

Also your rotate tool needs to be in world mode, otherwise you wint rotate what you think you do

Due to the nature of how quats work you can do this ad infinitum as you can see in the video. Please not thet bacause maya goes quats and back its NOT a good idea to set keys haphazardly otherwise maya can reinterpret no move as 180 rotation so copy the values instead of keying them form the previous ones.

Now if you need this to be handled by a character it gets complicated, id suggest in that case you work out a mel script to do the keying instead.

PS like you see from the qt mov in previous post it works i did it yesterday in 1 minute. After i used 10 minutes designing my work flow.